Son of the Night

by Mark Alder

  The flagman waved and dropped the flag.

  He squeezed his legs into the horse’s side and it leapt forward like a tiger. Relax, relax, relax, tension in the arm. A breeze, a flash at his left side and it was over. Both had missed. Two passes to go. Eu was not a cruel man but he earnestly hoped to knock his opponent down so heavily he would be unable to get up for the contest of axe and dagger.

  He wheeled his horse, his breath hot on the inside of his helm. No flag now, just ‘feel’ for when to go. Straight away. Another pass and the tip of his opponent’s lance shattered against his helm in a flash of white light. He leant forward, grabbed the cantle of the saddle, dropping his own lance – which had missed badly. A glancing blow, but enough to temporarily scramble his senses. On reflex his hand came out and an unseen page put a lance into it. He’d turned his horse without even thinking of it. A box of light with a shadow inside it. The crowd’s roar dull in his ears. Go! Budda dum, budda dum, budda dum, budda dum. Bang! An immense jolt in his shoulder, the crunch of splintering wood. Budda dum, budda budda dum. He wheeled his horse, tore off his helm, leaving it clattering on its toggle across the mail on his shoulders, threw down his broken lance, sat up in his stirrups and raised his fist to the crowd, not in exultation but relief. His opponent lay flat on the floor, suddenly a knight again, a colourfully dressed man in blue and yellow, not a shadow at all. For an instant Eu thought the man was dead, but no. Thanks be to God; he tried to sit up, though he was clearly stunned and fell back again.

  Eu kicked his horse on to where Prince Edward and Queen Philippa sat, bowing before them in his saddle.

  Edward stood, clapping, laughing.

  ‘He thought he’d do the same thing to you twice, Raoul! A very bad idea with a knight of your experience!’ The knight he had unhorsed was helped to his feet, but sank to his knees again.

  ‘You’re kind, sir. A fortunate strike.’

  ‘You have a lot of good fortune in the lists, Eu. Have you ever been unhorsed ?’

  Eu bowed his head. ‘Badly rattled a few times, sir, but the angels watch over me.’

  That wiped the grin off Edward’s face.

  ‘Do they now. Though not at Caen, it seemed.’

  ‘That day they favoured you, sir.’

  ‘They did indeed. And continue to do so. You know my son has never been bested in a joust?’

  ‘His skill is famous in every kingdom of Europe.’

  Edward nodded grimly. ‘If he comes through to the end of the day in one piece we’ll square you up. What do you say?’

  Eu extended a hand to Philippa. ‘What does the lady say? It’s her son. I . . .’

  ‘My God, you’re that confident!’ The king turned to the nobles behind him. ‘You see, that should be a lesson to our English knights. I tell Eu I want him to face the most formidable man in the lists across twenty kingdoms, and his only concern is that he will hurt him so he asks his mother’s permission. You can’t go into these things with an instant of doubt in your mind. If you do – bang!’ He drove his fist into his hand. Then that look on his face again, like a goodwife inspecting a marketplace fish, thought Eu. ‘Do you look to my wife to get you out of it – are you wily, sir? Do I misjudge your valour?’

  Eu would have challenged any other man to back his words on the field of combat after such an insult, but kings are granted more licence than ordinary men.

  ‘If the lady agrees.’

  Philippa stood. ‘I would gladly see it. Gladly. Why do we queens raise our sons if not to fight?’

  Eu bowed and then Philippa did something extraordinary. She took the scarf from the top of her headdress and offered it to him. What did that mean? A gesture of extraordinary courtesy and welcome to an honoured prisoner? He bowed in his saddle.

  Edward seemed mildly irked.

  ‘Lance, axe and dagger. Three passes with each. You’ll test my son at close of play and then we’ll feast and tell our stories, what?’

  ‘Should I survive,’ said Eu with a smile.

  ‘Don’t be gloomy, Eu. Of course you’ll survive.’

  ‘Didn’t the prince take the Count of Hasselt’s head off his shoulders at Ghent?’

  ‘Little Edward was only a boy then and suffered from an excess of enthusiasm. His skill has increased in the intervening years.’

  ‘Glad to hear it.’ Eu looked into Edward’s eyes. Was the king really handing a sworn enemy the chance to kill his son? Deaths were far from uncommon in tournaments. And why endanger Eu himself, and with him a potentially enormous ransom?

  ‘I’ll ready myself,’ he said.

  ‘Do,’ said Edward.

  11

  Dowzabel of Cornwall, so-called Antichrist and would-be downthrower of kings and rulers, trod the streets of the new town. They were better made than any he had known. The streets were wide and laid with timbers to stop the boggy ground yielding to the wheels of the carts, the hooves of the horses, the feet of the great army it was built to house.

  It was not easy coming here, a siege within a siege. Edward had invested in Calais, building a whole city outside its walls to accommodate his men and to send a message to the burghers of the town – we are here for as long it takes. Do not think that the winter will send us home, do not pray for rain or for disease among our army. Here we are well supplied, our water assured, our streets clean and our filth carried away. Siege fever will claim you before it claims us. Your bowels will revolt, your teeth drop out. You will feast upon the corpses of your dogs and then your kinsmen and then your children before we move. Do not yield now. The moment for mercy passed when this temporary city sprang up outside your walls.

  And do not, above all, do not, pray for the rescue of your beaten master – Philip of Valois, who pretends to be king of France. He parades his army at the neck of the marshes, he threatens to break through by sea, he sounds his horns and his drums by night and by day. It is all he will do. The way to Calais is too narrow, we English too well defended for him to dream of victory. He could not beat us on the open fields of Crécy. How will he fare on the road through the marshes, four horses abreast, the white arrows of Wales and Cornwall and Romsey straining at the bow like hounds on a leash?

  Dow was called from his tent by his ympe Murmur, the little winged man, blue as a berry, with his horns and trident, flying in through the untied flap.

  Though the bowmen of Lucifer were well housed in the new dwellings, better than any had ever known in their lives, Dow had sworn never to sleep in a bed again until Eden was returned to the earth – Lucifer’s garden, before God crept in disguised as a snake and offered humanity not knowledge, but order, one above another, kings and paupers. So, for the last year, he had stayed in his rotting tent while his army enjoyed the luxury of timberbuilt houses.

  The demon sat on Dow’s outstretched hand. It was Wymund, he said, come back to camp again.

  An exiled thief, sent away from the company of Luciferians. He had returned six times before.

  ‘Must I banish him again?’ Dow smiled at the ympe.

  ‘You must save him.’

  ‘From what ?’

  ‘Our men are going to hang him.’

  ‘We don’t do that.’ Dow stepped out into the morning. Already the heat of the August day had risen, burning off the dew. He breathed in the scent of the warm grass, felt the sun on his face.

  ‘It’s good to be alive in the morning light,’ he said to the little demon fluttering at his side. ‘Come on, let’s rescue Wymund.’

  He touched himself on the right shoulder with his left hand, then on the breast bone and then on the left – once for each of the prongs of Lucifer’s pitchfork. Such gestures had become common since the army had assembled and it felt good to display his faith openly to his men. His men? He should not allow himself such thoughts.

  Was he the leader of the boiling, angry, revolutionary poor? The thought made him uncomfortable. He was their counsellor, their adviser, their friend. But he knew well what they called him – or rather
what his enemies did. AntiChrist. Demon, God’s enemy. His friends placed a greater burden on him. They said he was the Second Coming. The Messiah.

  His people believed that Jesus, who is called Lucifer, lightbringer, in the Bible, had come back to bargain with the old god to do away with ideas of sin and kingship. Jesus agreed to call God ‘Father’ if he would release humanity from the yoke of oppression. But the old god had tricked him and nailed him to a tree. Now the new Christ would come and restore Paradise on earth. He believed it with all his heart. But he was not sure he was that Christ. Surely Lucifer should come. Surely he should break free of Hell, where God had thrown him, overthrow God’s jailer Satan and come back to set men as equals again.

  But Lucifer had not come so that left him, trying to show people how to break the habits of knee-bending, order-following and cap-doffing their forefathers had handed to them in the same way the nobles’ fathers had bequeathed their lands, cattle and servants to them.

  Three men of Cornwall fell in beside him as he moved through the town – big tin miners, skin etched grey like demons themselves. He was known in the camp, of course, and it would not have been impossible for someone to try to kill him. The king would not move against him – he needed his bows too much – but some proud slave of God, a low man or even an impetuous noble, might strike him down out of fear of what he was. He greeted the men in their own language, his native tongue.

  ‘Cuthman,’ he said, with a nod: Friend.

  Among the bowmen and the Luciferian camp this was becoming the way of address – his influence. He wasn’t sure that was a good thing. But what if you release people from slavery and their first impulse is to begin looking for another master? What if, when you remove the shackles, you find yourself holding them?

  He glanced over at the town, its walls pale and pretty in the sunlight, the sea a shimmer behind them. Beneath the walls was another camp, poorer than his own. These were the poor people of Calais, expelled by their masters to save food and prevent disease. King Edward had refused to allow them passage; the burghers of Calais had refused to allow them back in. So they sat beneath the walls – the old, young, sick and dying – their skin peeling in the summer sun.

  Dow had tried to insist they be moved on, but Edward had told him he would not be dictated to. The starving poor were a drain on the resolve of the besieged, they needed to stay where they were to sap the nerves of the defenders. The Luciferians had given up some of their own rations to feed them but it was perilous to approach too close to the walls, for fear of crossbow bolts, hurled bricks, or just catching the diseases stewing among the expelled. Something needed to be done, though. Edward might use words like ‘English’ and talk of standing up for the nation, but that was just a trick to make the poor think they had common interests with their king. The people beneath the walls were Dow’s nation – the dispossessed.

  In the bowmen’s quarter he could hear shouting, so he hurried along, his heavy falchion – the great cleaving sword he had stolen from a devil – at his side.

  Six or seven men stood around two figures. One was the familiar shape of Wymund the thief, hunched forward over his knees. He was not difficult to recognise as his nose had been cut off, along with his ears, giving him the appearance of a weather-beaten gargoyle. The other was a girl so thin she might be mistaken for one of the bone-faced men, the skeleton army of devils Philip had employed at Crécy. She lay curled up on the floor, her hands over her head.

  ‘Friends!’ Dow called.

  The men turned to him, making the three touches of Lucifer as they did so, a couple bowing their heads.

  Stomping in from the opposite direction to Dow came the rotund Joanna Greatbelly, wife of the next person to appear – Edwin, the so called ‘Black Priest’, a priest of the Roman Church but a late and zealous convert to Luciferianism. The priest was a spare and bony man but he carried in his arms a stubby-limbed, squat-nosed little demon. This was Know-Much, his familiar. He was accompanied by a third figure, a tall and imposing man in the tattered clothing of a wandering fighting man. His hair was long, his beard unkempt. You would say he was around twenty-three if you did not know him to be over forty. He had drunk of angel’s blood and appeared to be in his prime.

  ‘Lord,’ said one to Dow.

  ‘Cuthman,’ said Dow. ‘No lords here, brother.’

  Not strictly true, of course. The fighting man was Montagu, former Lord Marschall of England and now a Luciferian too, though for reasons that were entirely personal rather than ones concerned with the fate of the world.

  ‘Yes, Lord,’ said the man. ‘Will you settle this for us? I say this Wymund should hang.’

  ‘And I say he should not,’ said another man. ‘There are no hanging trees in Eden.’

  ‘We are not yet in Eden, brother,’ said Edwin, nodding in acknowledgement to Dow.

  ‘What has he done?’ asked Greatbelly. Instead of the yellow hood of a whore, she now wore the padded coat of a warrior. The Luciferians had agreed the rule that anyone who was of age should be allowed to fight, and anyone who was of age could decline to do so. Each would give the service they could, and a lifetime running a brothel in Southwark had given Greatbelly more fighting experience than most men of her age.

  ‘He brought this girl to the camp.’

  ‘I took her bravely from beneath the walls of Calais,’ said Wymund. ‘I risked spear and rock and buckets of shit to fetch her. And I paid for her – she’s mine!’

  ‘That is brave,’ said Dow.

  ‘He was looking to sell her here,’ said the man.

  ‘Sell her ?’

  ‘To make her work as a whore.’

  Dow studied the girl. Her eyes seemed unnaturally large in her hunger-wasted face. She lay on the ground curled in on herself, staring into nothing but quite unmoving.

  ‘He’s banished from the camp as well,’ said the man. ‘Under pain of death.’

  ‘We didn’t say that,’ said Dow.

  ‘Then, Lord, what is to prevent him coming back here all the time ?’

  ‘Has he used you?’ said Edwin to the girl.

  Greatbelly knelt at the girl’s side and put her hand to her cheek.

  ‘Beer,’ she said. ‘Bring this girl beer, for her sustenance.’

  Dow scratched his head. Wymund was the most difficult sort of poor person – made dishonest and unpleasant by his upbringing and circumstance. All he had ever got in life, he had to steal or lie to get, from his earliest years.

  Montagu walked up to Dow and said, in the French-tinged voice of an English nobleman:

  ‘If you do not deal with this, then how are the people of Calais to have faith in our promise to treat them kindly? What example does it give to the others of our camp who might consider the same, or worse? Our men may expect to do similar as the right of the conqueror. They will need strong deterrence.’

  Dow said nothing. If Calais could be treated well in surrender, if the Luciferians could gain a reputation for mercy, then the poor of other towns might throw open their gates to them and the days of the kings might be at an end. If not – if his troops ran wild in the traditional way of victorious armies – they might not even establish Eden in one town, never mind in every town of the world. And yet it would betray everything to punish this man too severely. And then it begged the question of what could be done to him. He had lost his nose and ears to the laws of the lords. Cutting off a hand might kill him. Dow ran his tongue along the inside of his lip. The tongue was split where a priest had cut it as a punishment when Dow had been just a boy.

  Beer was brought for the girl while Dow pondered, staring out to Calais.

  Fires on the ramparts, four of them lit in beacons.

  A great sigh came out from the new town, then cheers and celebrations.

  ‘They’re signalling surrender!’ said Montagu.

  So it was over. The year of waiting. Edward would fulfil his bargain to give the Luciferians the town and Eden might be restored. It had to be a sign.
Good things were around the corner.

  ‘Let Wymund go,’ said Dow.

  ‘He’s committed a master’s sin,’ said Edwin. ‘He has owned another person.’

  ‘Thank Lucifer for this forgiveness, Wymund.’ Dow gestured to the sun. ‘Try to live your life in the morning light from now on.’

  ‘Do I get to keep the girl?’ said Wymund.

  Montagu kicked him in the guts and Wymund fell forward with a great cry.

  ‘No,’ said Dow. ‘No one gets to keep anyone. That’s the point of why we’re here.’

  ‘I paid for her!’

  ‘Be thankful the lord doesn’t pay you what you deserve,’ said a man. ‘I am not a lord,’ said Dow.

  ‘You might need to be!’ said Montagu. All around them, men were up carrying bags, baskets and even pushing handcarts in a rush to get in to plunder the city.

  ‘No slaughter!’ shouted Dow. ‘No slaughter!’

  From the gate six skeletal men walked, their heads in nooses, stooping in submission, or fatigue. Dow’s heart went out to them for an instant. All order shaken, all certainties gone, putting themselves at the disposal of the English king as a sacrifice to save their people.

  ‘They are a poor sight,’ said Montagu. Dow’s sympathy cooled.

  ‘They are well enough dressed. Every day, all over creation, the poor are under siege by the rich. There are children living in the streets of London who would regard these good burghers as fat men. The siege is over for them. For us it never ends.’

  ‘You cannot feel pity for them? It is one thing to be born a low man. To fall into it is quite another.’

  ‘Lucifer fell from Heaven,’ said Dow. ‘He seeks to regain it but to bring all men with him. These men would tread on their fellows to regain their former state. I spit on them.’

  A thick file of English men-at-arms came out to surround the burghers. Dow saw the banners of Edward hoisted and making their way towards them, though he could not pick out the king.

  Then Wymund got to his feet and ran hard for the open gate of the city. It sparked a riot. His captors sped after him but everyone else in the camp assumed they were heading to the town for easy pickings and charged to follow. The men-at-arms saw the poor coming and, not wanting to lose out on the advantage their nearness to the walls gave them in being first to the plunder, surged forwards to the gates.